Procreate ($5), a painting app for the iPad, has updated to version 1.8 which brings a significant overhaul to the program. The app, which won an Apple Design Award at the WWDC this year for its overall excellence, has added a freehand selection tool, a copy and paste system, painting and brush improvements, transform improvements, a new 1080p preset and other improvements to its Create Canvas interface and over a dozen other changes and fixes in the free update. This is on top of the major changes in version 1.7 from six months ago.

The program allows users to draw from 48 built-in brushes on a canvas of up to 4096x4096 resolution with up to 17 layers at that resolution and up to 128 layers at HD and lower resolutions. The app features Dropbox integration, a dual-texture system and multi-touch gestures, along with exporting to PSD files and other formats and support for the latest Pogo Connect styluses. Additional brush sets are available as in-app purchases for $1 apiece.
The new v1.8 has a dizzying array of improvements, including enhanced interface animations, performance boosts, re-designed Actions and Stylus connection menus, a refined fit-to-canvas gesture, and improved Flip Canvas user interface and Jot Touch 4 support. The company says the update has "a ton of performance improvements" including improved interpolation for gallery thumbnails, a quick pinch up gesture for Zoom memory, metadata for dimensions and file size, a shortening of exported file names and the usual bug fixes and stability improvements.
The new freehand selection tool and point-to-point polygon selection let users add, subtract, invert and clear selections, as well as recall the last selection, select layer contents and adjust the selection mask's visibility. The copy and paste system can be revealed with a three-finger-down gesture, and can cut, copy or paste anything. The hue and saturation palettes now remember if they've been set to black, and brushes now remember the current brush, can save brush setting in the background, rotate brush source images, and offer better short-stroke handling. There is now a brush cursor option, a fit-to-interface option, the ability to tap the brush source to invert the image, and the update adds brush size, opacity jitter and charge to the options.
A number of improvements have been made to the Transform command, including "vastly improved" transform magnetics, interpolation, nodes and the ability to nudge a transformation by tapping outside the bounding box. The Create Canvas interface now has new 1080p and A4 300dpi presets, new artwork can be created from the clipboard, and users can now import from .procreate files in iTunes.